The team behind the benchmarking suite, Geekbench, has rounded up the scores for Apple’s newest Retina MacBook Pro models and finds that despite slower processor clock speeds across the board, the Haswell-powered laptops outperform their predecessors by as much as 8%.

To be more exact, single-core performance for the 13-inch variants is up only 2% to 4% over the previous generation, which John Poole, founder of Geekbench parent Primate Labs, attributes to the new revision’s focus on power efficiency rather than speed gains. The 15-inch variant sees much larger leaps in performance in its high-end configuration – the newest 2.6-gigahertz flagship jumps 8% in both the single and multi-core benchmarks over its 2.8 gigahertz predecessor for example. The mid- and low-end variants gain a more pedestrian 2% to 4%.

Interestingly, the latest high-end 13-inch MacBook Air trails the new 13-inch MacBook Pro by only 5% in the single-core benchmark, though the gap widens to 13% in the multi-core benchmark. Poole had the following to say regarding the matter:

Users with applications that only use one core won't notice much difference between the Air and the Pro.

This doesn’t extend to the laptops’ battery life, however, as the MacBook Air still bests the new MacBook Pro by three hours in that category. Poole calls the performance increases from the more conservatively-clocked Haswell processors “interesting” but notes that the processors aren’t always running at the advertised speeds. Thanks to Intel’s Turbo Boost feature, the clock speeds can be increased as needed to handle more demanding workloads, which the 2.3 gigahertz Haswell chip in the newest MacBook Pro can boost up to 3.5 gigahertz.

The scores, which began to surface recently, are based on both processor and memory performance. GPU performance hasn’t been included and as a result, we have yet to see what effect the inclusion of Intel’s Iris Pro graphics chip has on the Retina MacBook Pro’s capabilities.